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Introducing Social Sharing

Our new Social Sharing feature went live yesterday, making it super easy for you to share your campaigns on Twitter and Facebook and then see a report of the results. Before I dive into the details, here’s a preview of the new Social Sharing report. You can click it for a full-size version.

We’ve been thinking long and hard about the best way to add this kind of social integration into Campaign Monitor. As always, our goal was to keep the sharing process as simple as possible for you and your subscribers. Here’s how it works.

In-email sharing made easy

The easiest way for your subscribers to share your email is by adding a “Tweet” or “Like” button to your campaign. Then with a couple of clicks any subscriber can share your email with their friends or followers. To do this, we’ve introduced two new tags that you can easily add to your existing designs.

Add a “Like” button to your campaign

Just add the following tag anywhere in your email design and we’ll instantly turn that into a working Facebook “Like” button.

<fblike></fblike>turns into

When your subscriber clicks on this button in their email, we’ll load the following lightbox where they can “Like” your campaign and see which of their friends have also liked it. Here’s an example of this in action:

If you don’t want to use the standard “Like” button, just add your own text or image between the tag and we’ll turn that word or image into a link that, when clicked, loads the lightbox like the one above.

Add a tweet button to your campaign

Let your subscribers tweet about your campaigns using the new tag below.

<tweet></tweet>turns into

If your subscriber is a Twitter user, clicking that button takes them straight to a compose window with the tweet pre-populated with your campaign subject and a shortened URL linking to the web version. Here’s how that one looks:

Just like the Facebook Like tag, you can add your own text or images between the <tweet></tweet> tags and that will be used instead of the default tweet button, giving you complete design flexibility.

Sharing made simple for your clients

If you’ve built templates for clients, you can easily add permanent “Like” and “Tweet” buttons to them that work for every email they send. We’ve also made it simple for clients to add their own share links to any campaigns they send using the editor.

Get the word out from within Campaign Monitor

Our new social tags aren’t the only way to get the word out about your latest campaign. You can also share them yourselves right from Campaign Monitor. The report for every email you’ve ever sent now includes a new “Share” button in the top right corner. Here’s how it looks:

Clicking the “Share button” will open the modal popup below, where you can share on Twitter or Facebook with a single click:

Whenever that URL is mentioned on Twitter or “Liked” on Facebook, we’ll track the results for you. You and your subscribers can share your campaign any way you like and we’ll handle the rest.

Real-time reporting to bring it all together

While there are lots of different ways to share your campaign, we bring it all together with the new Social Sharing report. This includes who tweeted about your campaign, who liked it on Facebook and who forwarded your email on to friends. Basically, whenever anyone shares your campaign, we’ll show you who it was and how they did it.

The report is broken up into two parts. Up top we’ve got a summary of the activity so far across Twitter, Facebook and email forwards.

Below that is a real-time list that pulls all of this together into a single activity stream. See what people are saying about your campaign on Twitter, who’s sharing on Facebook and which subscribers have forwarded it to their friends.

For each subscriber that tweets, we’ll show you their Twitter avatar and a link to the tweet in question. We also link to the subscriber snapshot and display a gravatar if available for anyone who “Likes” your campaign or forwards it on to friends.

There are loads of other subtle features in this report, but I’ll leave some of them for you to discover once you start sharing. We hope you guys have fun with this new feature. It’s a brilliant way to learn more about who is sharing your campaigns with the world, and what they’re saying about you in the process.

A big thanks to everyone for all the passionate and overwhelmingly positive comments about this new feature. You’ll be pleased to know we now support custom domains for all social sharing, and have more exciting updates to social sharing rolling out shortly.

Nice features! Questions about the tracking to help understand it better to explain to my clients.

Twitter: Seems that you are pulling tweets based on a search for the shared URL, is that correct? Also, are you storing the tweet data locally or simply displaying the data from a realtime search each time page is rendered?

Facebook: What is the criteria by which a like will show up in reports? Do privacy settings come into play or will all likes be reported on regardless of user settings?

Thanks

Marcus
12th January

Thank you! It’s this kind of innovative attitude and simplicity that makes CM the best email marketing service there is!

This look great, thanks guys! Quick question abt forwards. Does it track forwards like Litmus, via the forward button in an email client? Or via FTAF. If not I’d love to see that feature in CM (also read rate for that matter if I were being greedy). Though this rocks and I can’t wait to try it out.

It would be great if you could do the same in social.min.css to override this.

Also it would be awesome if you could assign a URL to the like button, e.g. <fblike url=“http://www.facebook.com/swordfox”></fblike> maybe only for the template based buttons not those added from the editor.

Jeremy
12th January

The “Like” image doesn’t look any good on backgrounds other than white, due to the corners being transparent.

@Seth: “Seems that you are pulling tweets based on a search for the shared URL, is that correct?”

That’s right. Any time the shared URL is mentioned on Twitter through tweets and retweets we’ll show that in your reports.

Are you storing the tweet data locally or simply displaying the data from a realtime search each time page is rendered?

Twitter’s own search wasn’t up to scratch with the results quality we were after, so we’ve partnered with a third party service that indexes tweets to give you guys the most accurate results possible.

What is the criteria by which a like will show up in reports?

We’ll show you likes from all subscribers that received the campaign. If any non-subscriber likes it, we show you a sum total of them at the bottom of your activity field.

Do privacy settings come into play or will all likes be reported on regardless of user settings?

Not for your own subscribers, we will show them to you regardless, but for any non-subscribers who re-like that campaign from a friend’s Facebook page, we can only show you a count, no personal data will be made available for those people. Hope that helps.

@Anna: Great to hear you like it, I look forward to seeing what the Style Campaign crew does with it.

Does it track forwards like Litmus, via the forward button in an email client? Or via FTAF.

Right now it’s FTAF only. We’re a little concerned with the accuracy of organic forward tracking right now, and will continue to do more testing and tweaking before we introduce something like this into the app. I agree it would be very useful, if it’s accurate.

@Graham McLellan: Nice spotting Graham, we’ll make some CSS tweaks to ensure this won’t happen in the future and get it live ASAP.

Also, you can actually supply your own Like or Tweet button, just place your images in between the tags I mentioned in the post and we’ll turn that image into a Like or Tweet button for you.

@Jeremy: Could you share a screenshot of that please. The buttons should be transparent PNG’s that work on any background colour. I’d like to get to the bottom of that one for you.

Jesse Dodds
12th January

We’ve just fixed up the solid background on the Facebook Like button and the social.css file so the h1 and close button links can no longer be overridden by custom styles. Should be going live soon :)

@Graham: Gotcha. Because Facebook likes require JavaScript or an iframe to work, we can’t do them directly in an email. So, we need to go to a landing page (in this case the web version of your email with a nice lightbox asking them to click Like). If you wanted it to use your URL, you’d need to roll your own Like functionality on your site.

@David: Hmm I don’t think we’re on the same page. With the generated JS on the web version the FB code is something like: <fb:like href=“http://createsend.com/t/r-DE90E6BAD2E089A0” show_faces=“true” width=“400”></fb:like>

What I am requesting is instead of the href attrib defaulting to that of the email URL it would be good to be able to pass in a particular URL e.g. a face book URL so they can directly like an FB page.

@Graham: I’m on your level now. I’ve discussed this with the team and everyone agrees this would be a useful improvement. We’ll look at giving you this kind of flexibility in a future release, and I’ll be sure to post here when it makes it into Campaign Monitor. Thanks for the suggestion.

How about putting tweet & like links in the forward to a friend page? I think the more opportunity you give recipients to tweet or like as opposed to emailing a max 5 friends the better. This would need to be optional & configured in the Customize Forward to a Friend page as not everyone uses twitter & facebook.

Really like this new feature which has been added and will add another interesting layer of insight for our emails.

One request I would like to see - I would like to be able to share directly to a business page (i.e when sharing currently, I can only share to my own personal profile). So effectively when I click share to Facebook in my reports section, I would be able to choose from a list of pages which I administrate and select one for the message to be shared across on there.

@John: That’s a nice idea and something we’re looking at supporting soon. We hope to make it easy to either let people promote the email itself, or another page you specify like your Facebook profile, or a specific landing page. More on that soon.

@Rhys: We actually went down that path originally before we built the social sharing and forwards. It’s something we’d consider, but given how easy it now is to add these directly to the email, we’d need a few votes before going down this path. Thanks for the suggestion, and consider your vote added.

Jeremy
13th January

David,

Screen shot showing how bad the Facebook “Like” button is on a dark background may be found here:

@Jeremy: Thanks for posting that, can I ask which email client that is, as it doesn’t look like it’s supporting the alpha transparency in the 24-bit PNG. We might have to switch to transparent gifs for the best cross-client support.

but… like other commenters without the ability to specify a custom domain I don’t think any of our clients will use the Facebook like button.

I guess this would mean either

* some extra field/s in the client settings page (title/url for facebook like links maybe?)
* a case by case little form that comes up when you click Facebook LIke in the editor toolbar (would allow different names/url to be used in different campaigns)
* some variables that can be added to the template tag <fblike title=“My Site Name” url=“http://www.mysitedomain.com”>

@Steve: Yep, we’re looking into custom domain support now, as well as more flexibility about what the subscriber will actually “Like”, be it the campaign itself, a landing page, or your company on Facebook. We want to keep this as flexible as possible for you and your clients.

Traus
13th January

Great feature! Just used this for a live send and really like how simple it is. I would like to add to the requests for custom domains though.

Also, can this be part of the send process? We schedule lots of emails in advance and it may get confusing if we need to go back to deploy them to Twitter and Facebook once they have gone out.

I would like if it were possbile to put the 10 latest Twitter posts and/or the 10 latest Facebook posts into my newsletter so that my recipients can see what are the hot topics of the moment. Are you planning anything like that or if I can already do that, tell me how. I can do that with MailChimp, but I want to switch to you.

I put an iframe in for the Facebook and that works OK. However, I cannot find a Twitter widget that doesn’t use Javascript.

@Luciano: It’s not available via the API right now, but we’re always looking to add as much of the app functionality to the API, so it’s definitely something we’ll get to eventually.

@Marni: This isn’t on our roadmap right now, but may be something we’d consider if more votes came in. Thanks for the suggestion.

jdilelle
14th January

Awesome addition â€”Â thanks so much.

I am giving it a try right now and there’s one thing that I don’t get: the Facebook lightbox reads “Share your campaign with friends and family with one click!”. Will the recipients see that? That copy doesn’t seem right for the recipients… or am I missing something?

On a different point, i agree with jdilelle above, the text on the Facebook lightbox seems very cold from a recipients point of view, it would be great to take in the campaign name instead of ‘your campaign’.

@jdilelle and @Rhys, thanks for your thoughts on the copy at the top of the Facebook lightbox. We agree with you guys completely and have just removed it altogether. This change has been pushed live into production too, so it will no longer be visible for any future shares.

yep +1 for custom domains for sure
gone to all the effort and then they are sharing a “createsend.com” URL
confusin for some, and of course we all like to avoid any confisuon from clients

also this note
“One request I would like to see - I would like to be able to share directly to a business page (i.e when sharing currently, I can only share to my own personal profile). So effectively when I click share to Facebook in my reports section, I would be able to choose from a list of pages which I administrate and select one for the message to be shared across on there.

Is this a feature which is being developed?”

this is definitely needed
i just tried to share a sent campaign from within CM admin to test it out and it will only share to my personal wall?
this seems a bit odd…as would think from within CM admin itself…most clients would always want to share the sent campagin to a business page?
or am i missing somehting here?

Maria, the tags will work in all Campaign Monitor templates too (in fact you can add them directly from the content editor).

Contact support with details if you can’t get it working and we can help you out.

Victor
26th January

I know this is already a great feature, but my client asked me if we can somehow show how many others like it as well… you know how on a website we can click the facebook ‘like’ button and then it will show up how many others has like it too?

Great feature! With Facebook, it would be great if this posted to the Wall (as opposed to the Profile page) for significantly higher visibility. Also, in its current format (unless we’re implementing it incorrectly) the post reads:

“Eric likes “XYZ” on createsend.com”

Would be great if it read: “Eric likes “XYZ” on client-name.com”

Thanks!

ronin
29th January

+1 for custom domains

sol
31st January

yup - me too for custom domain + displaying number of likes and also the ability to customise the hover message

Cheers CM!

Dave
1st February

Yes, custom domains please. I can’t see any response to this number 1 request from CM - why?

@Dave, you’ll be pleased to know we’re working hard on custom domain support right now, and hope to have it release soon. We’ll announce it in the blog the moment it’s available. We’ve also got some other cool improvements to our social report that makes it infinitely more flexible in how and what you can share with subscribers.

This is great guys!! I have a campaign to send out tomorrow, and I will be using the facebook and twitter buttons for sure!

My only question is if a campaign administrator like myself can designate a Facebook Page to post the “spreadin’ the news” rather than through my individual profile status update. I only use Campaign Monitor newsletters for my business pages, so one should be able to select a FanPage to link the email news post.

@Tonia and @Raul, we completely agree with you guys there and are working on an update now that would let your subscribers not only like the email, but any other page you specify too, such as your own Facebook page. Details on that will be coming soon.

Fantasmically awesome feature, but I’m not sure about showing the world the ‘createsend.com/etc’ URL…

I think I’ll wait till custom domains are supported

Adam
2nd February

It’s a great feature, but you really needed to sort the ‘Custom Domain’ stuff out before launching it or indeed similar products. Agencies will not happy with this oversight, and you’ve potentially caused a lot of embarrassing issues with their clients. You make such a great effort to assist agencies in all other ways and then to do this seems utter madness. Please be more aware of this and similar issues in the future to protect the hands that feed you.

Good additions however it’s a real pity the “export list of people who forwarded the campaign” function has gone.

Glenecia Green
2nd February

Love this feature!

A couple of questions: Will I be able to see the Like and Tweet buttons if I send a test to myself? Also, does it post the entire campaign or just that specific article when it’s shared (wondering if I should place it after each story or just one for the entire newsletter).

This is a great update and something we are very much looking to use! Well done. We currently don’t have a facebook page but we do have a Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. Is there any plans for a similar share feature for LinkedIn too?

This is very cool guys. I’m going to implement it on a campaign I’m sending out this Friday. Nice Work!

David
3rd February

Haven’t read all comments but has someone mentioned that for the client inline Quick Links the alt text that displays on hover is misleading. For the fb link the text is “Like this campaign on Facebook” (correct) whereas the Twitter one says “Share your campaign on Twitter” - surely it should say “Share this…”. If I’m being really picky I’d also rather it used the word “e-mail” than “campaign”. Otherwise a neat addition.

Dan Stevens
3rd February

@David, I was just about to ask the same question. It should say something like “share this on Twitter” (don’t even mention campaign or email - especially campaign, that’s internal marketing speak). Ideally it would be nice if we could customize these phrases.

One other issue I’m experiencing - and this happens when I view the email in a browser (or during testing), I get a warning in IE that the site is trying to download a file to my browser. After accepting this to see what is going on here, xd_proxy.css is being downloaded from static.ak.fbcdn.net. Can you shed some insight on this? I can see this triggering corporate/ISP spam/phishing filters which will further reduce our deliverability.

Dan Stevens
3rd February

One other issue I’m experiencing (building off of the second issue above), when I preview the email in my inbox, it’s taking a very long time for the images contained within the email to appear. This only happened AFTER I added the socialization buttons.

Firstly you don’t need to worry about this triggering any issues with email filters at all. Requests to static.ak.fbcdn.net are for generating facebook like box itself, which is only loaded when looking at the web version (it depends on iframes and javascript, so we only insert it when viewing the web version). It’s not a part of the email content.

As for why you’re seeing this warning, I can’t be sure. I’ve tested in IE6/7/8/9, and don’t get any security warnings in any of them, and you’re the first customer to have mentioned this. Do you have any custom security settings? Perhaps contact us at “support at campaignmonitor dot com” with a screenshot if it’s still causing problems for you.

Question for you. The title of the email is generated from the meta-title of the campaign which would assume that for each email you would adjust the template so that it would be more related to your send. Any future enhancement planned so this information would be pulled from another place? From name? Subject line?

Thanks,
Michael

Dan Stevens
8th February

As you look to improve/refine this functionality, i hope consideration is given to using Facebook SHARE in addition to LIKE. I’ve always felt sharing something on Facebook is more impactful than liking something. Plus i believe sharing also auto-generates a thumbnail image to accompany the shared content.

I like it but it would be even better if you were able to populate the tweet text with something specific. i.e. a short message containing a hash-tag or a RT @me etc.

Otherwise it’s not that useful.

Same with FB really, if we were able to customise the message I think this would be a far more valuable tool.

Dan Stevens
10th February

By providing Facebook “sharing” instead of “liking”, you would be able to add a customized message.

J
10th February

My client has reported the same problem as mentioned by Dan Stevens. Using IE8, a security warning appears and leaves the editor unusable (the edit buttons do not work).
Unfortunately I can’t access their machine to inspect what security settings are causing this, but for now I had to ask them to use a different browser.

Jamie Thomas
10th February

This new feature is great, I’ll be using it straight away!

Just a few things to add:
1. Ability to edit the default message. It’s a bit of a problem when the default message is the Subject line, especially if it has personalization tags in it.

2. It would great if you could have the option to only post a certain article section instead of the whole campaign.

Hi Rhys, we’re happy to say that custom domains is going to be included in a (near) future release, alongside some other improvements for Facebook sharing. Stay tuned to the blog as we’ll have full details posted here.

Patrick
17th March

Not sure whether its just me, but the the graphics aren’t showing up in all browsers on the MAC properly:

@Patrick: Thanks for letting us know. We just did a pile of testing across those and other browsers and couldn’t replicate this one. If you’re still seeing it, could you please get in touch with more details so we can get to the bottom of it for you.

I think Jamie Thomas is having the same issue .2 but the text that gets pulled into the teaser text currently is the top part of the email header which isn’t ideal. Is there anyway of controlling what text goes in here?